Condemned to Musichttp://www.artsjournal.com/condemned
David Patrick Stearns has no way outTue, 27 Jan 2015 04:04:45 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=242The Prototype Festival’s Scarlet Ibis (and the day I almost ate glue)http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2015/01/the-prototype-festivals-scarlet-ibis-and-the-day-i-almost-ate-glue/
http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2015/01/the-prototype-festivals-scarlet-ibis-and-the-day-i-almost-ate-glue/#commentsTue, 20 Jan 2015 04:47:28 +0000http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/?p=1267When I was a kid, my older brother tried to feed me a tube of airplane glue. I’m sure he thought it was for my own good. Perhaps the glue resembled toothpaste?

It made a great story over the years: Mom caught brother in the nick of time though with so much glue flying around that nearby furniture had to be re-varnished. Now, this micro-confession is a disclaimer for my hopeless capitulation, really from moment one, to The Scarlet Ibis.. This new opera with words by David Cote and music by Stefan Weisman created a quiet sensation at the Prototype Festival with its parable about an older vigorous brother and a younger sickly birth-defected one that embodies the fragility of society’s rare-bird artists who are easily bullied and extinguished by the abrasiveness of the larger world.

The older brother is constantly disappointed at not having a physical equal for his boyhood adventures in their rural North Carolina home, coercing the kid into pushing himself to walk (which was not expected) with a near-sadistic brand of tough love. Nicknamed Doodle because he previously crawled like a doodle bug, the sickly kid also has visionary, poetic qualities. But pushed beyond his physical limits, he dies.

Bolstered by some of the best lines from the James Hurst short story on which it’s based, the opera has a wonderfully clear narrative about the child’s attempted progression into the normality that he doesn’t really want, but that his older brother insists he must have. Along the way are any number of affecting musical set pieces, such as a church hymn that Doodle sings asking God to be healed (greeted with mocking tones by his brother). Then there’s his rhapsodic interaction with a tropical bird (a scarlet ibis) that seems to have been blown by a storm out of his natural habitat, seems pathetically exhausted and dies.

How to stage such a thing? Director Mallory Catlett and designer Joseph Silovsky devised a diorama across the rear horizon of the stage (at HERE arts center in downtown Manhattan) that almost subliminally provided atmosphere. Doodle himself, a creature almost as unimaginable as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s baby-born-old Benjamin Button, is portrayed by a puppet who is initially carted about in a wagon, later in a row boat, often on gurney-like tables that are rolled around the stage. The concept is so effective, for instance, that when the two are boating in a swamp and lower a water container to see what they can dredge up from below, you’re there with them in ways that a more comprehensively realistic set wouldn’t allow. The puppet itself had a vaguely questioning facial expression – but not so much to ruin the tabula rasa quality that accommodates the emotional life breathed into the object by a trio of puppet masters. Countertenor Eric S. Brenner, meanwhile, gave Doodle a voice.

The piece’s simplicity of means – and its impact – were not unlike those of Juan Darien, the semi-legendary 1988 studio-theater show that put director Julie Taymor and composer Elliott Goldenthal on the map. Similarly, The Scarlet Ibis score abounds in lyricism but can’t be said to have traditional tunes.

To say that the music is somewhat anonymous isn’t a criticism so much as a compliment to how selflessly it’s devoted to characterizing every scene. No Wagnerian artifice shoehorns (or elongates) the story into a larger symphonic scheme. With a sound envelop resembling Appalachian Spring in its original chamber-orchestra version, the music subtly creates an effective netherworld between major and minor when the family first attempts to explain this highly unusual second child to Brother. Rhythms are simple but give an appropriate emotional pulse of every scene.

When the score momentarily quotes the Falcon music of Die Frau ohne Schatten, one realizes how much The Scarlet Ibis runs counter to the usual steep peaks and valleys associated with traditional opera. More temperamentally akin to film scoring, the music achieves its own kind of foreground operatic status if only through its dramatic precision. Most distinctive is the way the score gives the characters the time to think onstage. In contrast to more traditional opera where an emotional explosion is followed by a quick exit, important events have contemplation time that makes music and story even more insinuating.

The Scarlet Ibis earns its pathos so honestly that, for the singers, this may have been a remarkably low-pressure gig. No need to cover the weak spots or “sell” the scene any any traditional sense. It was great to hear Abigail Fischer and Keith Phares (mother and father) singing in vocal comfort zones that explored the piece’s dramatic truths rather than showing off what they can do. The excellent Nicole Mitchell was the woman who recognizes the alternative power of a fellow outsider from the moment of his birth. The dominant role of Brother was a major assignment for the theatrically resourceful mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn who played the role’s bullying heedlessness with a fearless lack of charm. We’re supposed to know this character, not love it. And Chinn sang effortlessly.

The Scarlet Ibis had to have been developed (by HERE and Beth Morrison Projects, in association with American Opera Projects) with great care. So easily, one could look at the piece the way Brother looks at Doodle, claiming that it should be more normal, like what’s seen at the Met. Where’s the outsized heroism? Where’s Aida and Siegfried in all of this? Luckily The Scarlet Ibis had the courage to be itself.

My own identification with the piece diverge strongly from the actual plot. Though the quieter No. 2 child, I was never physically compromised, but didn’t speak well (which is its own kind of prison) in contrast to my more socially adept older brother. Yep, I was the odd one – in small-town Illinois, checking out Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande from the public library and writing fiction about a final-stage alcoholic who loses his legs in an accident and sets up residence at the bottom of a McDonald’s garbage can.

Little did I know that my entire family would be wiped out by bad habits that had plagued the family tree for generations. And mine was hardly the only one. People began dropping left and right in the middle-class subdivision where I arose. The man who had the neighborhood’s best-kept lawn came home drunk one freezing night, slipped on the ice, passed out and froze to death a few steps from his front door.

When being typical is hopeless, you’re less inclined to follow in those kinds of footsteps. I thank my outsider status for the perspective to recognize and properly take preventative measures against such things in my own life. I take absolutely no pleasure in reporting this, but it is a fact.

Not all Doodles die young. Some grow into tough old birds. And art is the catalyst.

]]>http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2015/01/the-prototype-festivals-scarlet-ibis-and-the-day-i-almost-ate-glue/feed/1The weirdest day of my recent lifehttp://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/12/the-weirdest-day-of-my-recent-life/
http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/12/the-weirdest-day-of-my-recent-life/#commentsWed, 10 Dec 2014 05:09:25 +0000http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/?p=1244The invitation sounded innocent enough. Somebody had died, leaving a massive classical record collection. Would I take a look to see if it’s worth donating to a school or something – despite the formats (LP and 78s) being out dated? “Sure.” “You’ll have to wear a haz-mat suit.” “Really? Who was this guy?” “He was […]]]>

The invitation sounded innocent enough.

Somebody had died, leaving a massive classical record collection. Would I take a look to see if it’s worth donating to a school or something – despite the formats (LP and 78s) being out dated?

“Sure.”

“You’ll have to wear a haz-mat suit.”

“Really? Who was this guy?”

“He was a morbidly obese shut-in and lived in squalor.”

The sketchy story that unfolded – nobody wanted to talk details – is this: The man was the son of opera aficionados, was one himself, but had few if any relatives, and tended to spend his days, if out at all, at the public library indulging in various arcane interests. Or maybe he was one of those library denizens who are there because few other places that would have him.

And then he was murdered. Nobody knows why or by whom.

He was a defenseless for sure. Maybe the murderer did it because he/she simply could. Arriving at the compact three-story townhouse – your basic old Philadelphia “trinity” – I was told the place had been cleaned up enough that only a face mask and rubber gloves were necessary. Looking through the records, I thought his tastes were pretty mainstream. About the only thing I would’ve wanted to hear was a 78 set of Gyorgy Sandor playing the Liszt Sonata in b, but I don’t have a proper player. Few do.

Concert programs were everywhere and fascinating, some dating back to the Philadelphia Orchestra’s summers at the now semi-operational Robin Hood Dell. In a Beethoven 9th from 1961, the soprano soloist was a young Teresa Stratas. It’s hard to imagine that the hyper-dramatic future star of Mahagonny, Pelleas et Melisande and the Franco Zeffirelli film version of La Traviata ever did any oratorio work. Maybe the gig was good, quick money. Maybe Beethoven rarely has it so good.

A program from the 1929 Philadelphia Orchestra season at the Academy of Music had an advertisement for chamber music concerts featuring familiar names such as Pro Arte String Quartet and less familiar ones such as Swastika Quartet. Arturo Toscanini had an entire Philadelphia series with the New York Philharmonic. The orchestra program itself, led by Leopold Stokowski, daringly ended with the challenging, now-neglected Prokofiev Symphony No. 2. A 1931 program had Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 on the first half, Vaughan Williams Norfolk Rhapsody on the second. The back page carried a homey letter from then-president Herbert Hoover encouraging home ownership. In 1931. Such a different time. And as I write this, I’m coughing from the dust….

The great mystery was the 3-by-5 cards that were scattered throughout the house like confetti. One featured the cast list for a 1928 cast for Tristan und Isolde at the Berlin State Opera. Another documented a 1898 Faust at Covent Garden. What was this? What did it mean? One closet opened up onto shelf after shelf of baseball cards. Were the opera-cast cards some strange extension of that?

I started to wonder what mysteries my apartment might hold if people who didn’t know me very well had to clean it out after my death. I remember one of my cat sitters looking around at my collection of discs and books and saying, “I just love being surrounded by so much data!”

But in a town like Philadelphia – where a sizable portion of the population is self-appointed Judge Judys (I hear from them often) – I can just imagine the withering questions that would be asked about my thoughtfully and passionately collected belongings.

Q: Was he just a little bit obsessed with Der Rosenkavalier? He has every
recording ever made of the piece. He probably swanned around the house
lipsynching to the Marschallin.

A: I love Der Rosenkavalier but once had a magazine assignment to write a complete survey of the opera’s recordings. The level of performances is so consistently high that I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of any of them. Also, they were the backdrop for the inexplicable disintegration of a four-year relationship. And in defiance of gay stereotypes, I never longed to be anything like the regal Marschallin The clothes are too much work. I like to maneuver.

Q: Why three recordings of Lili Kraus playing Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat? Same performance, same label, one is a CD, one is an LP….

A: You never know when you’ll need it and I don’t want to spend forever looking for it. What can be a morose Schubert sonata has great hope in her hands. She was captured during World War II by the Japanese (she was on tour of the down-under hemisphere) and forced into several years of hard labor. And yet she came out of it and went onto a mid-level, multi-decade career. Such perspective is important.

Q: What’s Petula Clark doing in here?

A: Remember that Glenn Gould adored Petula Clark. If she’s good enough for
him…well, you know the rest.

Q: Who is Jo Stafford? How could anybody so obscure make so many recordings?

A: My first musical memory is Jo Stafford singing “I Got a Sweetie” and it’s even better with each return visit. The saxophone solo still rocks. The voice was soothing but not bland, because everything she did had a subtle undercurrent of jazz. The voice tells you that the world is somehow in balance. Her signature song, “I’ll be Seeing You” wasn’t a hit so much as it was a public service during WW II and earned her the name GI Jo.

Q: Ah! The Johnny Mathis Christmas Album. See? He really was a fraud.

A: Not if you think of him as Nat King Cole’s kid brother. I can’t wait to they stumble upon the Mae West Christmas album. Or the Zsa Zsa Gabor exercise video. I love unintentional and accidental humor. It’s like a mistake in nature. The bigger the better….

Q: What are all these home-made discs marked M5, YNS, MTT, BR3….looks like fractured British postal codes.

Q: All of these rectangular sheets of paper have the same numbers – 250 and 350 – next to names like “Milhaud” in fancy writing. Looks a bit pretentious….

A: They’re assignment slips from Gramophone magazine. The numbers refer to my limit (which I always exceed). The handwriting is that of my editor Andrew Mellor, who is the polar opposite of pretentious.

Q: Look! On the inside sleeve of this Judy Collins album there’s a message scrawled. It says, “Bob, meet me down at the lounge.” Look at that awful handwriting. He really must’ve been partying that night….

A: In fact I had been tear gassed. The Vietnam War was still going on and some anti-protester vigilantes threw tear gas canisters into the stairwell of the high-rise dorm where I then lived – in the middle of the night. I woke out of a sound sleep with my face feeling ignited. The awful thing about tear gas is that your natural impulse is to rub it off your face. In fact, it’s acid, and just hurts more. The only thing you can do is find your way to some fresh air and splash water on where the gas got you. And in this dorm, each floor had a lounge with a separate ventilation system. The Bob in question was my roommate.

So….there’s always more to any given story. The truth is rarely what you first think it is. Judgments are the product of an under-utilized brain.

End of sermon.

Lili Kraus

Lili Kraus

]]>http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/12/the-weirdest-day-of-my-recent-life/feed/1The Henry Mollicone underground operashttp://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/11/the-henry-mollicone-underground-operas/
http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/11/the-henry-mollicone-underground-operas/#commentsTue, 18 Nov 2014 05:35:48 +0000http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/?p=1230Who ever said that opera had to be grand? It wasn’t in the original mission statement when opera was invented more than 400 years ago with composers setting out to recapture the power of once-sung Greek drama. And they did so in royal courts that couldn’t have been very large. But even as opera became gargantuan, smaller chamber works have been written, performed and loved over the centuries but rarely embraced with the fervor of bigger, louder Elektra and Turandot.

The starting point of this grandeur-challenging train of thought was the Chelsea Opera’s recent double bill of small-scale one-act operas by Henry Mollicone. Though the West Coast-based composer wrote one of the most popular operas by a living American composer – The Face on the Barroom Floor – the piece itself is largely unknown to most Metropolitan Opera subscribers.

Though only a half-hour long, Face on the Barroom Floor has two parallel plots, two fights, two death scenes, a soprano aria that’s mournfully similar in
character to the “The King of Thule” in Berlioz’ Damnation of Faust and a
trio whose melodic inspiration and dramatic function work hand-in-hand in a way that even the best operatic set pieces do not. Set in the Wild West (and based on a ballad poem that was popular school-boy fare in the early 20th century), a penniless prospector ambles into a bar and pays his tab by painting a portrait of his loved one of the floor – who turns out to be the tough bartender’s current girlfriend. A fight ensues, but she’s the one who is shot. The plot is framed and mirrored in modern times with a fledgling opera soprano in Central City who is being squired around by her East Coast boyfriend – and into the bar where she had an affair with the bartender the previous summer.

It’s an ideal young-artist opera, partly because anybody who masters that level of singing and brawling is likely to be extremely well equipped for anything else that might come their way in grand opera, where narratives don’t have the cinematic swiftness of Mollicone.

I didn’t know the opera or even that it existed until I was hired to work on a documentary film that was shot in Colorado at the Central City Opera a few summers ago. By itself, the recording was puzzling. Later, I found myself, camera in hand, in the company’s compact studio theater (with bleacher-style seats on three sides of the stage) finally understanding what a gem it is. Though an “underground opera” – so to speak – it’s not obscure or oblique. Musically, Face falls neatly into opera history somewhere between Puccini, Menotti and Heggie. But until you’re right down inside something that moves this fast, you’re less likely to realize that Face on the Barroom Floor – and its more harmonically-evolved Chelsea Opera double-bill companion Emperor Norton – is as theatrically effective and melodically memorable as anything in American opera.

Everything was in order in the Chelsea Opera production at St. Peter’s Church on West 20th Street in New York. The cast, which was vocally stronger than in Central City, was led by Mollicone and directed by Lynne Hayden-Findlay with perfectly logical motivation. Still, only 70 percent of the opera revealed itself. These aren’t like big operas only smaller. They’re a medium unto themselves that need their own kind of theater. Traditional stages stand too far apart from the audience. Time, place and plot changes that are crystal clear at close proximity become murky on a traditional stage.

Emperor Norton, which I was hearing for the first time, takes on the even more elusive dramatic problem of self-delusion, the sordid details of which are withheld from the audience for most of the opera. This time we’re in San Francisco where the self-styled emperor visits restaurants where he believes himself to be above having to pay the bill, but was once the owner of a business gone bust. The opera also has a double plot: Norton’s story is being acted out in the a play workshop where a mysterious actor turns up, clearly the ghost of Norton, to pilot the project in more truthful directions.

Again, I felt too far away. With all of the best efforts of Justin Ryan (Norton), you had little sense of the title character’s complicated inner life, or his mental illness rescuing him from pain that simply can’t be lived with. The ego tug-of-war between Norton’s truth and the playwright’s need for control could’ve been a sharper electrical current running through the piece. Again, the only solution is a breakdown in the physical theater itself, which means fewer seats to sell and even less earned income in the every-penny-counts world of small-scale American opera.

Beside needing a sympathetic performing space, these operas also need to be presented in the thick of whatever community they’re in, almost as an early-in-the-evening after-work presentation that can make what is normally a special-occasion outing to the opera something that’s more embedded into everyday life. An entire body of work is waiting to be discovered, because in the world of underground opera, Mollicone has plenty of company.

]]>http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/11/the-henry-mollicone-underground-operas/feed/1Curlew River: Britten’s madwoman as samuraihttp://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/10/curlew-river-brittens-madwoman-as-samurai/
http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/10/curlew-river-brittens-madwoman-as-samurai/#commentsFri, 31 Oct 2014 05:44:23 +0000http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/?p=1218Never do I listen to Britten’s Curlew River as an opera-goer. Partly because I’ve always had to travel considerable distances to hear the piece live, I am, in effect, a pilgrim – and one who happens not to be inclined toward pilgrimages.

More than that, Britten’s 1964, 80-minute piece about a madwoman looking for her lost son is a confluence of so many things that my expectations about well-made lyrical drama are left far behind. It’s an aesthetic vacation of sorts. With ritualistic deliberation and allegorical formality, Curlew River doesn’t get away with lacking plot, melody and any sense of extroversion so much as it does away with any need for these things with its unfiltered revelation of core issues in human existence – one reason why the imported production starring Ian Bostridge felt perfect for Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival. It opened on Thursday Oct. 30 for a three-night run, and not in any theater, but at St. John the Divine.

Considering that Upper West Side cathedral is about the size of Rhode Island, the performance was sensibly held in what’s called the Synod House at 110th Street and Amsterdam, a highly-atmospheric neo-Gothic chapel that’s now outfitted with a miniature airstrip of a stage around which the audience (numbering less than 500) is seated. A loose-gravel walkway for the processionals gave the singers’ footsteps an added percussion to the sparer-than-spare orchestra (in this case the excellent Britten Sinfonia under Martin Fitzpatrick), dominated by chamber organ, percussion, harp and horn.

Musically, one could say that it’s Ceremony of Carols meets the Serenade for Tenor Horn and Strings – put to the service of a piece whose framework is English medieval miracle play but whose manner comes from Japanese Noh theater – with an all-male cast. The setting is a ferry boat across the river where, on the opposite bank, an abused child had mysteriously died a year before, and whose grave is considered sacred ground. Most ferry passengers don’t know or care, though the last minute boarding of a shambling, raving madwoman who sings in a key alien to everyone else, brings an added charge and purpose to the journey. The distressed boy was her kidnapped son. By the end, she hears his voice, and amid all of her grief, is restored to a tentative sanity.

Why does Curlew River inhabit one’s psyche so completely? This production was experienced at such close proximity that the listeners were almost part of the performance. I swear that singers often broke the fourth wall and were looking me right in the face. The sense of ritual, if anything, heightened the story’s pathos because there’s no kidding yourself about the tragic direction that the piece is taking. The lost boy, who has been essentially beaten to death, could be any one of us, figuratively speaking, in the wake of family deaths, professional disappointments and incidents of betrayal. You don’t know the kid; you’ve been him. You’ve also been his mother, when facing the intractability of loss.

In this production directed and designed by Netia Jones, the set had a ship sail at one end of the performing area and lots of computerized imagery (birds, rippling water) projected onto the stage floor. At one point, Bostridge (who was the madwoman) was kneeling on the stage amid stark shafts of light in the shape of a cross. Soon, though, that turned into a pervasive gray, oatmeal-ish texture that covered the entire floor – an image that was even more devastating, suggesting the boundless emotional sea in which the madwoman was adrift. Though some productions have given the madwoman some pretense of femininity, this low-artifice approach had Bostridge dressed in a manner that was equal parts samurai and monk. He was also clothed in jet black – a start contrast to the dead-of-winter gray that was the rest of the production.

One need not use much imagination to know that the Curlew River is the River Styx, that the cold, mocking ferryman is Charon and that all of the passengers with the possible exception of the madwoman are, in fact, dead. That may be why the ferryman is so unsympathetic to her: However devastated, she’s alive, isn’t she? The boy, who appears at the end, is more than a voice. He physically appears, still with all of his bruises and wounds from life.

The singing was consistently excellent – not that one noticed all that much because voice, movement and stage imagery were so much of a piece, though Mark Stone was a particularly fine Ferryman. In light of Bostridge’s eccentric recital manner in recent years, casting him as any sort of mad person might seem like an invitation for overkill. Not so. The voice was unusually rich and his manner was a model of power projected with restraint. He barely moved at all for much of the performance; everything came from within. By the end, and during his bows, he looked downright traumatized.

Overall, this is the most penetrating encounter I’ve had with Curlew River, the Britten theater piece that reached the furthest by fusing disparate elements as if they always belonged together, even though their points of contact were made from distance centuries and hemispheres. Though Britten wasn’t one to explode forms in the manner of his avant-garde contemporaries, he came close to doing so here – even more daringly within church walls. What makes the piece even more fascinating is that there’s nothing like it, not in Britten’s output or in anybody else’s. Curlew River more than portrays existential aloneness, but illustrates it with its existence.

]]>http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/10/curlew-river-brittens-madwoman-as-samurai/feed/7Scott Johnson’s Mind Out of Matter: Should music make so much sense?http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/10/scott-johnsons-mind-out-of-matter-should-music-make-so-much-sense/
http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/10/scott-johnsons-mind-out-of-matter-should-music-make-so-much-sense/#commentsWed, 08 Oct 2014 04:11:14 +0000http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/?p=1202

Scott Johnson’s John Somebody album

When music starts talking to you in plain English, what – if anything – are you supposed to learn? Imagine a brilliant, engaging lecture on the origins of species encased in an ongoing musical narrative and you have Scott Johnson’s Mind Out of Matter. Days after the premiere, I am still wondering what the piece wanted to give me, vs. what, in fact, I got.

The aesthetic here isn’t pieces for narration and orchestra, but pre-recorded speech embedded into a musical composition – which clearly reached a new level the weekend of Oct. 5 at Montclair State University’s Peak Performances series with Mind Out of Matter. Steve Reich started that ball rolling with works such as It’s Gonna Rain (1965) in which snippets of recorded speech were looped and manipulated electronically to create a compelling, high-energy musical structure and narrative. But it was Scott Johnson who first used speech snippets as motivic kernels embedded into an instrumental texture, most famously in what many call his guitar symphony, John Somebody (1982).

Somewhat later, Reich’s Different Trains (1988) tended to be mistakenly credited with that innovation with its use of emblematic voices in a World War II triptych. Later, Reich took on the Biblical dawn of man with The Cave, which wasn’t overtly instructional, but took you to the source of the Middle East tensions that occasionally threaten to end the civilization that the warring tribes more or less began.

Johnson’s ambitions in Mind Out of Matter were more nuanced and comprehensive than those of The Cave. In John Somebody, the pre-recorded speech wasn’t informational, but was a poetic talisman that ran through the piece, mostly serving a musical function but sometimes creating a sense of being lost in modern life, as a female voice falteringly asked with interrogative inflections who is “John Somebody.” The central voice of Mind Out of Matter belongs to Darwinist Daniel C. Dennett, discussing how man’s domestication of certain beasts – cows, for example – has been an act of genetic engineering through natural selection, and then going on to show how philosophies and religions can undergo a similar evolution based on man’s needs.

Reading the program and the texts used in this accomplished seven-movement, 75-minute piece were essential to telling what was going on in the piece on a moment-to-moment basis, even though the electronic manipulation of Dennett’s voice was relatively light and at times helped articulate the ideas, particularly as he questioned and answered himself antiphonally though opposite speakers.

Using a palette of string, wind and brass sounds in an instrumentation rather like Aaron Copland original chamber orchestration for the Appalachian Spring ballet, Johnson’s rich, ever-fresh, never-routine musical responses didn’t dramatize the words – the closest instance being a wittily jumbled harpsichord that looped around a description of an ant climbing a blade of grass. Basically, Johnson energized the words, almost as if mirroring his own personal excitement at the discoveries he made when first digesting these provocative, beautifully expressed ides, and doing so with a huge variety of two to eight-note motifs.

I loved the “Winners” movement – about how information competes for space in our brains – partly because it was shorter on text than most movements and longer on music. In “Good for Itself,” a movement about how people tend to want to be good, the trumpet writing suggested was like one’s conscience delivering a warning against the rationalizations the get in the way of aspiring virtue. Some of the instrumentalists did double duty as singers in the chorale-like music that began the “Stewards” movement whose words said “deer are for deer, wolves are for wolves…sheep are for us….” A sardonic micro-fanfare accompanied a passage in the “Surrender” movement about religious ideas that are worth dying for. Why did rhythmic clapping accompany the “Awe” movement? Don’t know. But I liked it.

I wanted the piece to soar more, for the music to take the words on a wilder, bumpier ride. But that doesn’t mean I’m suggesting a revision. Music can accommodate information well; one could argue that the libretto to Verdi’s Falstaff is basically informational rather than poetic. But the heady content in the words of Mind Out of Matter seemed to hold the music back. Julia Wolfe’s recent choral work Anthracite Fields had a lot of information, including the endless names of injured coal miners, but left plenty of holes in the narrative, giving listeners room to enter the piece and connect the dots as they will. This seemed not to happen in Mind Out of Matter. Yet.

But this complaint could well be addressed not by the process that happens when performers live with a new piece for a while. On the surface, you couldn’t have wanted for anything better from the modern music ensemble Alarm Will Sound. But keep in mind that most if not all first performances involve a certain amount of cognitive struggle even when the notes are in the right places. And certainly, most premieres don’t rock out the way I think Mind Out of Matter wants to in any number of spots. So the jury, for me, is still out on this piece. But the question is not if the piece is important or substantial – it is, unquestionably – but how much it stands to participate in the larger process of cultural evolution that the piece itself so well describes.

More J.S. Bach cantatas? Yes, and that’s good news not just for Bach devotees but for psychotherapists who stand to profit from the guilt that some (though not all) cantatas can induce among those who take them too literally.

After centuries of neglect, Bach cantatas are becoming a regular part of the concert landscape, thanks to Bach@1 at New York’s Trinity Church at Wall Street and Choral Arts Philadelphia’s Bach@7, which mixes cantatas with music by other composers of Bach’s time.

The 4X4 Baroque Music Festival, slightly uptown from Holy Trinity at St. Paul’s Chapel, had four concerts over last weekend: I caught the Sunday Sept. 14 From Darkness into Light that had a 14-piece orchestra and four vocal soloists for Bach’s Nimm von uns, Herr, du treuer Gott, BWV 101 (which begs God to take away the punishment we all deserve) and Wir mussen durch viel Trubsal BWV 146 (about entering the kingdom of God through sorrow). Yet I emerged from this wonderful concert guilt-free.

These particular cantatas are expansively composed and richly scored. The performances were conductorless (led from the organ by Avi Stein), making them chamber music of the best sort and avoiding the kind of contained, over-thought, tautly controlled performances I’ve heard from John Eliot Gardiner. I might even call the concert a conversion moment: Even though I revere J.S. Bach above all other composers, the cantatas have always been works I’ve been happy to encounter in concerts but are close to the bottom of my personal playlist.

So sue me or let scholar Richard Taruskin come after me with a pitchfork: He famously wrote in the New York Times several years ago that if you don’t know the cantatas, you don’t know Bach. I agree. But as one who has heard a lion’s share of them and has even sung a handful in earlier years, I have to ask: Must we love them as well? Or even like them? Or do the cantatas not allow that with their religious severity?

Musically, they’re very much a laboratory, an enclave of non-codified Bach, never going down a blind alley but taken roads less-often traveled and masterfully recycling his own music to express the texts with earnest specificity. The music can also feel like first thoughts, not rough drafts but half-frozen improvisations that go to more expressive extremes.

The down side is that the genre itself and the world that the cantatas comes from can seem awfully remote, with their finger-wagging texts and brutal reminders that the world isn’t a nice place and that human beings are hopelessly flawed. This is music with no responsibilities to engage audiences in any modern sense. Bach’s church-bound audience was as captive as can be. Applause wasn’t in the cards no matter how good or less-good the piece came out.

In my Opera News piece (July 2014) about the Gardiner book, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, I marveled at what an unstoppable creative impetus must have powered these cantatas, since so many of them were written during his Leipzig period were under a veil of disillusionment with the people he had to deal with and the forces he was given to work with. In BWV 101, written for Bach’s second cantata cycle in Leipzig that Gardiner describes as the composer surpassing himself, great wind writing is everywhere, like a Brandenburg Concerto with voices, not just in the obbligatos but in the deft use of wind choirs within the orchestra. In a group as small as 4X4’s, one hears every addition and subtraction of instruments, along with their expressive impact and technical ingenuity.

BWV 146 is even more ambitious, The opening Sinfonia is also the first movement of Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in d minor – the solo role transferring well to organ, especially as played by Avi Stein. The amazing opening chorus, sung by the soloists with one voice to a part, was built around a downward-slanted, two-note sighing motif though with so much else built around it. Revisiting the chorus in a Helmut Rilling performance, much of the greatness was lost in a mass of choral sound. Even compared to more historically responsible recordings, the 4X4 performance had a particularly enveloping aura.

Elsewhere in the cantata, the music was full of instrumental writing that’s not just sophisticated but let you into a world that felt quite separate from all the grave, admonishing texts. In a way, the effect was subversive, with Bach showing how good earthly life can be in his land of endless musical possibilities. Growing up Roman Catholic, I remember sitting through hell-fire Sunday sermons, tugging at my mom’s sleeve and whispering, “Does he mean me?” Mom always assured me that he did not. In a way, that’s what Bach’s instrumental writing tells me. If you’re thinking of parallels with Shostakovich and his language of double messages….I am, too.

The vocal writing has a similar but more muted effect: It tows the hellfire-and-brimstone party line but does so with animated invention that subverts all grimness. The singers, including Mireille Asselin, Kirsten Solik and Steven Caldicott Wilson were all well-matched and text attentive, with bass-baritone Jesse Blumberg projecting the words in especially buoyant ways, accentuating the music’s subversive quality. He also has a way of creating an illusion that he’s singing directly to you. The only other singer I know with that gift, at least on this level of artistry, is the Canadian mezzo Susan Platts. Imagine the two of them together.

]]>http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/09/4x4-baroque-music-festival-bachs-subversive-multiple-messages/feed/1Gramex to U.S. collectors: “Send us your enemies!”http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/09/gramex-to-u-s-collectors-send-us-your-enemies/
http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/09/gramex-to-u-s-collectors-send-us-your-enemies/#commentsWed, 03 Sep 2014 03:00:44 +0000http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/?p=1169London can be just about anything to anybody, but for collectors of classical recordings, whether CDs, LPs or 78s, it’s Mecca, equalled possibly by Paris (if only because French recording artists tend to stay home more, so their work has been less-often exported).

But during my summer trip to London, the usual haunts had been disappointing. There had been some excellent LP discoveries at Oxfam thrift stores both in Canterbury and Hampstead. In my internet searches, Gramex kept coming up, highly recommended, in a location conveniently near Waterloo Station at 104 Lower Marsh Street.

It was there exactly when I needed it – on a day that was not shaping up very well.

A morning business-related courtesy call to a magazine I work for was marred by broken-down subways. Upon arrival, there was an atmosphere of awkwardness, as if my colleagues and I didn’t know what we were all doing in the same room. Lunch came. Everybody went their separate ways. Upon making my way through Waterloo Station afterward, I ran into a man I knew from Philadelphia – having seen him only weeks before and, at one point, had courted him as a spiritual adviser of sorts. But he had no memory of me. None. Had I become a ghost in my own life?

Proceeding on to Gramex, I discovered it had recently moved, though only across the street. The new quarters looked a bit raw. Nothing up on the walls. Just a lot of card tables with lots of CDs stacked on them. The proprietor Roger Hewland had conked out on an easy chair so decisively (and was sleeping so quietly) I feared that he had been there for a few days and wondered what was London’s version of 911. His fresh-starched shirt assured me he was alive and had been sleeping only a matter of minutes.

I began looking through the stacks and seeing lots of things I would be jumping for joy to find – had I not already owned them. Lots of good re-masterings of live Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. Some Testament-label things that never turn up in collector shops.

The proprietor woke up. and directed me to a table of new arrivals, claiming that they were particularly interesting. And he was seriously right. Before long i had a formidable stack and he heartily approved of everything. A live Queen of Spades recording with Sena Jurinac. Peter Maxwell Davies concertos for instruments so diverse you had to hear how he did it.

“I might already have this,” I said.

“Bring it back if you do.”

“I may not be back for a few years.”

“Bring it back then.”

A regular customer rolled in, full of energy and dying to know where the 78s live. We all repaired to the basement that had many comforts of home. A microwave to heat up your lunch if the collecting urge run rampant over your plunging blood sugar. A bathroom. And lots of 78s and LPs. I found a French LP with a particularly ornate label and a performance of Poulenc’s Stabat Mater that I wanted to hear.

“Take it,” said Hewland, amid high-velocity repartee laced with periodic disclaimers that we were all perfectly welcome to be as rude as we wished, knowing that it meant nothing serious. We’d all been to the same Wigmore Hall recital the night before and were relieved to realize that we all thought Alice Coote, who had sung brilliantly, also looked mildly demented during unguarded moments. The pianist Christian Blackshaw was on an exceptionally high spiritual plane. Who was he? Why do we not know him? (A disc of Mozart piano sonatas recently came out on Wigmore Hall Live!)

Gossip flew. And so did the time. I needed to leave for the theater district – with a stack of recordings that weren’t just desirable but deeply interesting. Gramex gave me the loveliest afternoon of my week.

“Send us your enemies!” said Hewland as I went out the door.

No doubt because he could handle them. Probably in his sleep.

]]>http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/09/gramex-to-u-s-collectors-send-us-your-enemies/feed/1Dmitri Shostakovich, Yuja Wang, Cultural Drift and Cherhttp://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/08/dmitri-shostakovich-yuja-wang-cultural-drift-and-cher/
http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2014/08/dmitri-shostakovich-yuja-wang-cultural-drift-and-cher/#commentsMon, 11 Aug 2014 05:49:50 +0000http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/?p=1154Cultural drift has been of particular concern with Dmitri Shostakovich. The world was still very much digesting his extensive output encompassing 147 opus numbers – like those acres of string quartets written near the end of his fraught life – when biographies began appearing, revealing that covert meaning was often more prominent than overt. Subtext […]]]>

Cultural drift has been of particular concern with Dmitri Shostakovich.

The world was still very much digesting his extensive output encompassing 147 opus numbers – like those acres of string quartets written near the end of his fraught life – when biographies began appearing, revealing that covert meaning was often more prominent than overt. Subtext eclipsed text, one reason why the Emerson Quartet, for one, observed how the music doesn’t look like much on paper but creates its own world when played.

Bit what of the early works? The ones written before the Stalinist crackdown of 1936 that necessitated an abrupt change in Shostakovich’s compositional manner? Before the composer’s so-called `inner immigration’?

A different problem, here. Those early works mirror the world of post-Revolution, pre-World War II Russia that was boiling with cutting-edge creativity and burgeoning technology. And Shostakovich’s rowdy Piano Concerto No. 1 – which drew from his early years when he made money by playing piano in silent movie houses – is moving closer to the center standard repertoire, having just arrived at the Mostly Mozart Festival in a newly-minted interpretation by Yuja Wang on Aug. 9 at Lincoln Center.

Wang learned the piece only in recent months, tried it out with the Bay Atlantic Symphony at The Borgata resort in Atlantic City (where the orchestra has a summer season), and has several other dates to come after this New York engagement with conductor Osmo Vanska. But even the most historically-aware musicians of Wang’s 20-something generation aren’t likely to know The Keystone Cops, Mac Sennett’s bathing beauties or recognize the long-outdated mechanical pianola effects in the final movement. Such element, unmissable in any performance, were less prominent in hers. Whether or not that’s a shortcoming depends on how much the pianist compensates for what’s missing. In other words, does a piece as medium-weight at the Shostakovich concerto have other faces that performers can show the world?

The composer was a highly accomplished pianist and his recordings are to taken seriously. Many composer-led performances can have a dry urtext quality, but that would never do in this helter-skelter piano concerto with its eager-beaver tunes, solo trumpet commentary that’s alternately a source of poetic commentary and satirical militarism (imagine Prokofiev’s Lt. Kije on crack). But amid all of that antic musical collisions in the piece, Shostakovich’s piano playing on his two recordings sometimes feels more French than Russian, each note molded with its own sense of presence but also with a fleet, catch-me-if-you-can quality. In contrast to the powerful but less reckless French EMI recording of the concerto, Shostakovich’s Soviet recording (Yedang) feels faster and crazier, as if the pianist/protagonist is laughing all the way to the straightjacket.

In other words, it’s a good task for Yuja Wang, who tends to shrewdly assess a piece’s needs and attend to them in her own personal ways. The interplay with solo trumpet (Philip Cobb, with a deep, rich tone quality) show how much Wang has the soul of a chamber musician, even in that wonderful final-movement moment when the pianist basically tells the trumpet to shut up. Having found her way through the abstraction of the Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 2, Shostakovich couldn’t keep any secrets from Wang.

What I found most surprising about her performance is how the more reflective moments were shaped with a flexibility and warmth one associates with Chopin. So often before 1936, one senses Shostakovich screaming “I am not Rachmaninoff and don’t you forget it.” Artists everywhere around him were turning the page. The world was re-starting with a blank slate that didn’t include traditionally cushy romanticism.

Wang made the piece look backward convincingly with rounded phrases, bits of rubato and a sense of melodic movement that sometimes soared balletically. Like the composer, she brought a kind of glistening tone quality to the pianism pointing to Ravel influences and acting as a counterbalance to the music’s antic brittleness. Though it’s essentially a “now” concerto, Wang showed how “then” was perhaps underneath it all. Hardly a career-boosting concerto, Wang and Vanska conspired to create a performance whose accessibility came from a solidly personal relationship with the music. The audience seemed pleased. It was good to see.

Framing the concerto was Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8, which mirror each other from distant times and places. I didn’t love Vanska’s Beethoven symphony recordings as consistently as some people – they were so controlled and contained – so I was happy to hear that the conductor is letting the 8th fly a lot more while maintaining his smart sense of long-term line. So often when an artist has had an intensive recorded encounter with an important body of work, the subsequent performances feel like the cigarette after sex.

Speaking of sex: What did Wang wear? At first, she seemed to have replaced her high heels and higher hem lines with a full-length black dress. And then you realized the black was see-through fabric. So…imagine a sports bra and micro-mini-skirt covered with mosquito netting. It’s enough to bring Cher out of retirement. But wait: Isn’t Cher doing just that? Imagine putting the two of them in the same room. That would be historic – no matter what happened.

Applause seemed inadequate and inappropriate, like some weird contrivance of civilized life at the end of John Luther Adams’s Sila: The Breath of the World, performed by a dispersed collection of 80 singers and instrumentalists in its July 25 world premiere at Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors festival.

It was like applauding God for creating Magnetic North. Or tundra. Or glaciers

The title refers to Inuit cosmology: Sila is the force behind the force, that which powers everything from life to wind to weather. That’s not out of character from what the 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, long based in Alaska, has been writing for indoor orchestras – pieces like Become River and Become Ocean. Like Sila, these indoor works often hit a climax of sorts and maintain it to the point that it becomes a static state of being rather than a temporary peak.

As with any modern composer, Adams isn’t afraid to depart from tonality. And though Sila feels tonality’s gravitational pull, it neither yields to it nor floats into some weightless stratosphere. It’s as if he sampled the most emotionally intense moment of the Sibelius Symphony No. 7, held it and played with it in extremely slow motion. Far from the morphing-machine-tooled manner of American minimalists, Sila is more like a glacier that changes over time, even though it might seem stationary while you’re concentrating on it.

The Sibelius 7th moment I’m talking about is one that, in context, would be perceived as an unstable dissonance but is more like the basic substance of Sila‘s landscape. When the harmonies change, they don’t resolve as they would in Sibelius, but open a door to … something.

What it sounded and looked like: The Philadelphia chamber choir The Crossing was dressed in typical black concert dress, but got their long hems and pants legs wet while standing in the Hearst Plaza’s wading pool, whose water was warm enough (I checked) to not cause any summer colds. Strapped to their wrists were phones containing an app that allowed them to get their pitches in natural tunings. The singers were also armed with black megaphones and assigned slow-moving choreography.

On the grassy incline in back of them, brass and woodwind players were lined up to give what was, perhaps, the basis of the piece’s sonority. Along the opposite side of the wading pool were amplified strings. In what may be an intentionally witty touch, some of the violin effects sounded like cell phones.

The sheets of sound were sensuous but rarely felt consonant or at rest. Even if little or nothing was happening by standards of Western music, the piece had an inner restlessness that kept you engaged but didn’t take you hostage. At one point a firetruck went past – and blended rather well.

Being next door to the Metropolitan Opera at this point in time – amid the possibility of a disastrous work stoppage on August 1 – made the event all the more strange. The elemental aesthetic of John Luther Adams never trivialized the Met’s standard relics, even the sillier ones like Il trovatore, but made you wonder why those works attract and foster the sort of grand egos that produce them.

All of that said, I wished that Sila had been indoors. Selfishly, I wanted the more complete sound picture that an indoor performance would provide. And with an indoor setting where the audience was able to walk around, the benefits of outdoor performance would not be lost.

The best things in life may well be free, but when they’re free they’re not widely valued. It’s great that Lincoln Center, which commissioned the piece jointly for its Out of Doors and Mostly Mozart festivals, is so willing to give to the city, and do so with a carefully crafted piece by a major composer. But the audience contingent that casually wanders in and out of any free outdoor concert tended to divert the kind of group energy the piece seemed out to create.

The bright side of outdoor performance is that Sila could’ve flopped and it would not have damaged Adams’s reputation – because the piece was, you know, one of those “outdoor things.” So in theory, outdoor events can lend themselves to more adventurous experimentation. But Sila deserves significant attention, and it’s going to have to come in from the summer heat to get it.

Long before I walked into the Park Avenue Armory for Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The Passenger in the much-acclaimed, much-traveled David Pountney production, the opera itself had left me puzzled and underwhelmed, namely in the DVD shot live in Bregenz that preceded the opera’s many visits around the world.

The final scenes of this opera about Auschwitz and its aftermath were all I hoped they would be in terms of dramatic power. But the rest was undermined by its own less-than-singable vocal lines that had little sense of characterization and instrumental writing that was often compelling, but almost as often, seemed to draw a blank, like irrelevant scenic decoration.

Perhaps without realizing it, Lincoln Center Festival (which presented beautifully-prepared Houston Grand Opera incarnation of the production) filled in the many cracks two days before the opening with a panel of concentration camp survivors, chief among them Zofia Posmysz, now 90-something, who authored the story on which the opera was based. She not only survived Auschwitz but spent three weeks traveling on foot back home to Cracow.

The story’s genesis came after the war: She was in Paris on business and heard a voice that had probably haunted her in her nightmares: The German-language voice of her Auschwitz overseer, who had singled her own for a bit of favoritism that turned into occasions for close-proximity psychological warfare. Posmysz was frozen: Should she call the police? Stop and say hello? Keep walking?

She turned around. False alarm.

It wasn’t the overseer after all. The plot of The Passenger tells the story from the opposite perspective, imagining that her former SS overseer had become the respectable wife of an ambassador, on a long ship cruise to Brazil, when she thinks she sees a camp survivor and her sordid secret past comes out. The opera’s production made the survivor even more ghostly by her having a white sun veil over her face. In my review for WQXR’s Operavore blog, I made allusions to Banquo’s ghost.

The story was made into a movie that had to shut down in mid-production in 1961 when its director, Andrzej Munk, died in a car accident. Flashback sequences in Auschwitz were apparently finished, and stills had been taken for the ocean liner scenes that take place 15 years later.

Even in its state, the film is more compelling than the opera. The psychological warfare is easier to pinpoint. The film had faces. The Nazi overseer, with a passing resemblance to Jody Foster, was the perfect martinet in the camp scenes, and in the later stills, had convincingly aged into an ideal trophy wife though still with that lingering Nazi arrogance. Such precise casting just isn’t possible in opera, particularly in one as difficult to sing as this. The subtle exchange of affection between the inmate Marta and her fiance were one of the film’s most poignant aspects.

Weinberg had his own back story. He fled Poland the minute the German invasion was reported, but went east to Russia, suffered all manner of privation and eventually came to be a recognized composer, with the support of Dmitri Shostakovich. So he came to The Passenger with no lack of experiential depth. But could he express than in music? Of course, the opera portrayed the brutality of the camps in broad strokes rather than the scalpel knife of the film. Of course, opera compensates in other ways by emotionally opening up key moments, though Weinberg only did so in the final scenes. Though powerful, his ending seems to abandon all pretense of theatricality as the inmate Marta faces the audience and makes a impassioned plea to humanity. But gone was the character’s mystery, her poetic ambiguity.

Perhaps my disappointment wouldn’t have been so strong had I not the opportunity – for which I’m extremely grateful to Lincoln Center for providing – to be in the same room with the real-life survivors. Among them, I felt the strongest connection to Esther Bauer, who had been shuttled around to a variety of work camps and brought them alive with a wry sense of observation. “For the first 20 years after, I didn’t want to talk about it,” she said. “For the second 20 years, nobody wanted to hear me talk about it. And now…I’m taking all the speaking engagements I can get.”

But I’ve also had a run of modern operas in recent weeks, to which The Passenger stands up in unexpected ways. First up was Quartett by Luca Francesconi, which had an acclaimed La Scala premiere in 2011 and arrived this summer at the Royal Opera’s studio theater at Covent Garden. Claims about Francesconi being one of the great young composers of his generation perhaps aren’t exaggerated. His command of sound, both acoustic and electronically-generated, is unsurpassed, and was effectively put to the service of the story, which riffs on Dangerous Liaisons. The fact that the riff barely followed the original story wasn’t the problem. The opera became an extended exercise in sexual degradation, the sort that was very much in fashion in the 1990s (Louis Andriessen’s Rosa, for example) but seems so passe now, and wasn’t re-animated with much conviction in Quartett. By the end, the opera felt like a very complicated pose, a very fine composer making a calculated bid for public attention.

Contrast that with Love and Other Demons by Peter Eotvos, premiered some years ago at Glyndebourne but only recently issued on CD on Glyndebourne’s own label. I stumbled upon it at the gift shop during intermissions of Rosenkavalier, and what a revelation it is. Eotvos has has his triumphs (The Three Sisters), his duds (Angels in America) and now seems to be at a point in his compositional career where so much of what he does feels right, starting with the ultra-spare prelude in Demons, based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ story of a girl bitten by a dog, though nobody seems to know if she’s infected by rabies, Satan or simply love. Magic realism meets opera. Aren’t they sort of the same thing?

What do these pieces tell me about The Passenger? Better to have the conviction – that’s so lacking in Quartett – than the compositional technique, the lack of which leaves Weinberg groping for creative solutions amid the multi-faceted demands of the theater. Compare Weinberg’s surreal use of celesta with similar effects in Eotvos’ opening moments. Weinberg deftly creates atmosphere; Eotvos gives you a nursery rhyme going slowly awry, telling you much of what you need to know about what follows. That’s what happens when conviction and technique both run high. Only then do you have an opera.